Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

7.0 u2

Compute only HCI Mesh with vSAN 7.0 U2

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I guess that title explains it all, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2, we now also support connecting a compute-only cluster with a vSAN cluster. Meaning that if you have a vSphere cluster that does not have vSAN enabled, you can now mount a remote vSAN Datastore to it and leverage all the capabilities it provides!

I am sure seeing this new capability will make many of you happy, as we had many customers asking for this when we launched HCI Mesh with vSAN 7.0 U1. The great thing is that there’s no need for a vSAN license on the compute-only cluster, even though we load up the vSAN Client on the Client Cluster. No, we are not using NFS, but we are using the vSAN proprietary protocol for this. Another thing that may be useful to know is that we doubled the number of hosts that can be connected to a single datastore, this has gone from 64 to 128!

Last but not least, we have also extended the Policy Based Management Framework to allow for customers to specify which data services should be enabled on a datastore level. So if you select a policy, the vSAN datastores that will be presented, should not only be able to provide the RAID configuration specified, but should also have the data services enabled you require. Those data services would be: Deduplication and Compression, Compression, and/or Encryption, as shown in screenshot of the new policy capability below.

As mentioned, the feature itself is pretty straightforward and very easy to use. There are some things to take into consideration, of course, I wrote those down here. If you want to see it in action, make sure to check the demo below.

vSAN 7.0 U2 Skyline Health History

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I have already discussed this briefly during my 7.0 U2 video presentation, which can be found here, but I also wanted to share the demo I recorded with you, and provide some additional details. Over the past years, one of the most requested features for Skyline Health, or Health Check as it used to be called, was the ability to go back in time to see what has happened between certain dates. This functionality was demonstrated at VMworld, and a few VMUGs the past year, and now finally made it into the release with vSAN 7.0 U2.

The “health history” feature simply provides a toggle that enables you to go back in time. When you tick the toggle, you can specify a date range. Note that the range can be anywhere between the current date, and 30 days back. The health check data is stored, for 30 days, in the vCenter Server database. This is important to know because if you feel that there’s no need to store the data, you can disable the feature under vSAN Services in the Configuration tab. When you disable the feature the data is deleted from the vCenter Server database. Now if you flip the toggle, set a date range, and look at the different checks you should see green checks. If a check is not green, but rather red or orange you can click the check.

When clicking on the red square, you will see which check failed, and when exactly it failed. The number in the square or circle refers to the number of checks that were run and resulted in the same state. In other words, 37 red, 45 green, 54 red checks etc. When you click on it, you will see the below.

Hopefully, this will then allow you, during troubleshooting, to correlate particular failures or configuration changes, to the issue that bubbled up in the health check. I feel that having the date/time is already very useful, as it will allow you to focus on a more specific date/time range while reading logs or going through the events section.

Anyway, if you would like to see the feature in action, check out the demo below.

Introducing VMware vSAN 7.0 Update 2 (video)

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As you may have seen, today VMware announced the release of VMware vSAN 7.0 Update 2 (and vSphere 7.0 U2 as well of course). I was planning on doing a post on the 7.0 U2 release, but then I figured that I would try to record a video discussing most of the new features and enhancements introduced. Note, I do not cover the full release, I picked the features which I felt deserved some attention. I uploaded the video to my Youtube Channel, make sure to visit it and subscribe, as I will be releasing demos on various features in the upcoming weeks with some more detail where needed. Hope you enjoy it, and again, make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel!